Dallas
Shootings: Don’t Mention the (Race) War!
By
China Matters
For me
the central tragedy of this week is not the
massacre in Dallas, horrific as it is.
It is the
video shot in Falcon Heights of the aftermath of
the police shooting of Philandro Castile.
Absolutely
wrenching to watch. And it should be watched to
the very end. It is a heartrending depiction of
a family destroyed and the survivors desperately
trying to keep it together with courage and
dignity…until they can’t.
Micah
Johnson, I expect, also watched it, and it may
have contributed to his decision to shoot the
police officers in Dallas. He probably also
watched the video of Alton Sterling getting shot
while struggling with two police officers in
Baton Rouge. And a few other videos.
We can’t
ask him because sending in a robot with some C4
strapped to it to kill Johnson was, in the
judgment of the Dallas PD, preferable to waiting
him out. I have a feeling part of the cop
omerta code involves extrajudicially
executing, well, murdering cop killers
like Christopher Dorner as an
example/deterrent, but we’ll probably never get
the final word on that, either.
On July 8,
an African American man
opened fire on passing cars on a highway in
Tennessee, killing one and wounding three. He
was wounded, detained, and told officers
“because he was troubled by incidents involving
black people and law enforcement officers”.
Micah
Johnson was less circumspect. Before he died,
according
to Dallas PD, he told “negotiators” he
wanted to kill white people, especially white
police officers.
The New
York Times started its story on Johnson with the
misleading lede that “A military veteran who
said his goal was to kill white police officers
opened fire Thursday night in downtown
Dallas…”Pretty sloppy, Grey Lady. And shunning
an absolutely dynamite, click-generating lead.
Blacks hunting whites is hot. A vet blowing
his stack at the cops…not.
I’m
increasingly of the opinion that the fix is in,
and that the US government at the highest level
is determined to use the tools at its disposal
to keep a lid on this thing lest it escalate
into a national nightmare of copycat and
retaliatory killings. I’m guessing it involves
a crisis room (run by AG Loretta Lynch? Somebody
higher up?), outreach to surrogates, media, and
opinion leaders, with one message:
Ix-nay on
the ace-ray ar-way
“Play down
the race war angle” for those of you not fluent
in pig latin.
Or as
Loretta Lynch put it, “Do not let this
precipitate a new normal”.
I expect
it includes “outreach” to Donald Trump himself,
explaining his statement on the Dallas attack
that was characterized as “un-Trump-like” in its
dignified avoidance of race baiting and, indeed,
included a sympathetic if name-free shout out to
Castilo and Sterling.
I think a
high level of image management is going on,
starting with the inevitable characterization of
Johnson as a “lone wolf” (Talking Points Memo
does the pro bono work of walking back
the initial multiple shooter reports
here using the NYT story).
Cornered by police after the ambush, a suspect --
believed to be Johnson -- told a negotiator he
wanted "to kill white people, especially white
(police) officers," and said he was acting alone and
was unaffiliated with any groups, Brown said during
a news conference Friday. …
Later in the day, Brown said the investigation,
however, has "revealed to us this was a well
planned, well thought out, evil tragedy by these
suspects."
Note term “suspects” a.k.a.
plural, which means that DPD probably regards
Johnson’s statement that he acted alone as
conspiratorial opsec.
But by the end of the day on July
8, the mayor of Dallas, got the memo, stating in
a press conference—first reported by Buzzfeed!--
"We believe, given the facts we have today, that
Mr Johnson, now deceased, was the lone shooter."
Hmmm.
Then there’s the need to knock
down the extremely unpalatable possibility that
the attack could be characterized as terrorism,
thereby tossing a nice grenade into race
relations in the US. The "terrorism" framing is
suitable for Muslims, apparently, but nobody
wants to hang that tag on 13% of the US
population.
The
obfuscation was executed by the rather hasty
pre-emptive announcement by the US government
that there were no “terrorist links".
"Domestic terrorism" means
activities with the following three
characteristics:
-
Involve acts dangerous to human
life that violate federal or state law;
-
Appear intended (i) to intimidate
or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to
influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the
conduct of a government by mass destruction,
assassination. or kidnapping; and
-
Occur primarily within the
territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.
There is a determined effort to
provide a pleasing narrative of a lone wolf
outraged by cop violence and going berserk.
There is a distinct and
understandable queasiness about exploring
Johnson’s explicit black nationalist
sympathies. One of the few photographs of
Johnson shows him clasping hands with Professor
Griff, one of the members of Public Enemy
(Professor Griff by the way, denied any and all
relationships with Johnson on his twitter
feed).
In our clickbait driven journo
world, one would think the magical intersection
of celebrity, murder, and black nationalism
would spark a feeding frenzy. But the story
played overseas, at the Daily Mail, first, and
only got picked up in the US by the NY Daily
News, which led w/ Griff’s repudiation. In
other words, crickets.
Another issue is the right-wing
talking point that public expressions of
sympathy for black victims of police violence by
President Obama and Hillary Clinton created a
condoning and legitimizing environment for
expressions of black rage against police
officers that might go beyond swelling the crowd
at a Black Lives Matter rally. Awkward, but
probably true. Again, we’ll never know. And
the media is, I am pretty sure, disinclined to
speculate.
So much to keep the lid on. So
much lid-on-keeping going on. A story in
itself. In my opinion.
While AG Lynch steers the convo away from "angry
black nationalist(s) exact(s) retribution" to
the previous whites-only
theme of "PTSD-crippled
loner-vet's murderous
dysfunction triggered
by video nasties"
(maybe that counts as racial progress!) I expect
President Obama is prepping
a speech on a teachable, hug it out moment for
cops and blacks in Dallas next week. Well, if
that gives him enough political cover to hug
Philandro Castile's family, it's good, I guess.
But I wonder if it'll have a significant
impact on the current policing model, which is
overwhelming pre-emptive and laser-focused on
the confrontation and control , including
incarceration when expedient,
of young
men, black and otherwise.
Changing that
requires something of a revolution
in how we prioritize positive outcomes both for
young men and their communities.
Since the neo-liberal movement currently
ascendant in American government is averse to
pinkish policies that look beyond market forces,
coddling of capital, and exaltation of
individualism, let alone revolution, I expect
changes to policing to be largely cosmetic.
Maybe there's some public/private partnership
gold to be spun out of this situation!
Incremental improvements are
better than nothing, but I see current social
policies as (positive term) neglecting the
health of communities and (negative) doing
little to stem the continued erosion of the
state monopoly of violence.
In my opinion, America is not
"torn apart" by violence. It's held together by
violence, in a complicated and extremely fraught
way. The state lost its monopoly on violence
virtually at its inception and managing the
impact of non-state violent actors has been a
full-time job for the last 240 years. Sometimes
it gets very, very hard--remember the Civil
War?--and I don't think it's a walk in the park
today.
Today, thanks to the
proliferation of guns and cell phones, and the
rising narratives of white nationalism and black
empowerment, and the liberal mantra that the
best way to resolve social tensions is through
economic growth and opportunity (while cops
slice and dice the malcontents), job's
especially tough.
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